With all seven of my children home from summer visitation, things are as lively and loud as ever. But the biggest problem I face may be trying to readjust their sleep patterns to coincide with their school schedules. I’ve got two teenagers who are now going to bed well after midnight, and waking after ten a.m. And even my younger ones seem energetic late at night, then wake late in the morning. With all their lazy summer fun, my kids have naturally shifted back into a late sleep phase. School starts in less than a week, and those early morning alarm clocks are going to be, quite literally, a “rude awakening.”
It’s interesting to note that our bodies will naturally drift to a 25-hour sleep cycle, rather than follow our earthly 24-hours in a day. The only reason we stay on a 24-hour cycle is through our own discipline and habits. “It’s 9:00, time for bed,” etc. Without a disciplined approach to bedtimes, the human body will naturally drift into a later and later sleep phase. This is why, parents, we’ve got to become the “clock” again, and not allow natural body rhythms to rule. Summer’s over, and it’s time to get our kids back into a routine.
Correcting Late Sleep Phase
If your child’s lazy summer has caused a late sleep phase shift, you’re certainly not alone. This is very common, and takes some effort to reverse. That’s because, as I mentioned above, you’re going to work against nature to get the sleep phase back on track. You can send a child to bed, but it’s impossible to “make” a child go to sleep earlier. So your efforts here will be mainly focused on waking the child earlier in the morning, to “deprive” him of a little bit of sleep. (Make sure the child doesn’t make up for that deprivation with a longer nap during the day, or a new nap where there wasn’t one before.)
Determine what time your child will need to wake up for school. And what time is she currently waking on her own? What is the difference in hours or minutes? Now you’ve got to determine how many days until school starts, and divide that excess. In other words, if your child needs to wake at 7:00 a.m., and is currently waking at 9:00 a.m., that’s a two hour difference. Divide the two hours by five days, and you’ve got 120 minutes divided by five. That comes to approximately 24 minutes earlier each day that you’ve got to wake your child, and put her to bed. (Ideally, you’ve got more time to work with than just five days.)
Correcting Early Sleep Phase
Now, early sleep phase is often less problematic, but still can be frustrating for parents. Children on an early sleep phase tend to be very cranky and irritable in the evening, and then wake up with bounding energy at what seems like the crack of dawn. Poor parents who’d love to get another hour or so of sleep are forced to wake up and deal with their wide-awake child. Early sleep phase, for reasons mentioned above, is less common than late sleep phase.
The correction here requires adjusting almost all of the child’s daily activities slowly to a later time in the day. Breakfast should be eaten a bit later, and lunch. Any afternoon nap, especially, should be shifted to a later time. Dinner should be eaten a bit later. This will trigger a later sleep time in the child’s brain, over time. Later, the daily routine can shift back to regular times, while the child’s sleep pattern will follow the clock and stay later. Expect it to take approximately two weeks to make this change. And also realize that a later waking time in the morning means a later bedtime. You cannot hope your child will sleep in later, while also expecting to have your same free time at night that you’ve become accustomed to.
Mom = Alarm Clock
Wow, I’ve really got to get things adjusted here so my kids won’t be falling asleep in class. I’ll be wearing the “human alarm clock hat” here for the next several weeks, I’m sure. Hope things go well at your house!
Kristyn Crow is the author of this blog. Visit her website by clicking here. Some links on this blog may have been generated by outside sources are not necessarily endorsed by Kristyn Crow.